What We See
by Tin-Can-Hit-man
Summary: A collection of short stories, essays, and other oddities.
1. Chapter 1

I'd like to write something about changing everything about your life. I'd like to make sure it's not that hard to understand. I tried to say this to someone the other day, and I don't know if he understood it, because it's not easy to understand. It's easy to do; it's just not easy to understand.

I suppose it would have to start like this:

When I was younger, I used to deeply consider my options for never speaking again. I was nine years old, and I enjoyed mathematics to the point where I despised the things mathematics described. Mathematics weren't always telling stories to everyone; the stories they told me made me hate the idea of telling stories about anything. Confronted with combinatorics at the age of seven, I marveled at a Venn Diagram. If we see a Venn Diagram with two intersecting circles, one representing surveyed animals with hooves and one representing animals with horns, there's no telling what kinds of animals any of those animals are. We can only use our imagination: pigs and horses have both hooves yet no horns; that puts them on the left. Deer have hooves and horns both. That puts them in the middle. Rhinos have horns, yet no hooves.

Yet if we say it is a survey of people, with results displayed in two groups, those groups being ones who "like chocolate" and ones who "possess a penis," the resulting graph would contain concrete semantics outside its definitions. The left circle would represent chocolate-likers; the right circle would represent penis-owners. Everyone in the space where the circles intersected would be an owner of a penis who liked chocolate. Everyone in the right circle would be an owner of a penis. Everyone in the left circle would be someone who liked chocolate yet did not possess a penis. In other words, everyone in the left circle is female. (We will not consider anomalies.)

This kind of scared me as a kid. This is where human prejudices come from, I suppose: what we see when we see the opportunity to make a judgment of an entire group of statistics will always be the "right answer." The answer is correct because it can't not be. Everything comes back to experience. In this case, my experience (anatomy textbooks) told me that all humans without penises were women. As a child, a simple Venn Diagram with these defined criteria scared me solely because the word "female," "woman," or "girl" did not appear anywhere in the key, yet I knew every person in the left circle that was not also in the center overlap was most definitely female, just as certainly as I knew everyone in the center overlap was a man. The right circle didn't matter. It was too obvious.

Thinking a little more deeply on it, the nine-year-old me wondered, surely not all men have penises? Surely some of them get involved in accidents of some sort? For example, my mother often told the story of one of her brothers, who'd lost his fingers in an accident involving a heavy metal door. That so many words could be suggested and then produced by a simple diagram led me to the conclusion that it's really not worth talking about anything. I beheld words as lies: they are an alternate form of the thoughts we think, which are in turn alternate forms of the things we see, hear, and/or experience. Words are fuzzy copies of fuzzy copies; moreover, they are revisions of revisions. To alter something is to render it false (so thought a nine-year-old child), and altering something even after it's been altered once already is to further falsify it.

So eventually I stopped saying anything. I guess that went on for a long time. Every day seemed like a whole day, though the idea of a whole day seemed like nothing at all. So time passed more quickly. They say many great scientists, artists and inventors were able to naturally reduce their sleep needs down to less than three hours a day. I was down to about two when I was younger, though I doubt I invented or artisted anything great. All I did was lie in bed and think. I could trace my entire life back to the earliest memories, alive in a shopping cart basket in a supermarket. I was thinking not in words; I was thinking in shadows of what I had seen. Maybe this had to do with the removal of words from my life. I was like a deaf or blind person, only instead of a sense, I was lacking words. I didn't sleep, maybe, because my troubles were less than that of others.

I still don't sleep that much — maybe four hours a day. I'm still not a brilliant inventor. They say Albert Einstein needed fourteen hours of sleep a day to function. I can kind of believe that. I have these days, once every three months or so, where I just need to sleep all day or I'll feel like death. It might have something to do with diabetes. Or it might just be time catching up. It might be God's sense of modular arithmetic. Either way, I guess Einstein's sleeping fourteen hours a day, in the end, amounted to exactly the same thing as sleeping just three hours a day.

[Tenuous allusion to the Theory of Relativity continues here.]

Sooner or later I started behaving obsessively about everything. I played videogames until I realized that playing them would eventually undo me. Messing around in created worlds was just too much for me. There was something about a created world that ruined me philosophically. How a ten-year-old could be ruined philosophically — man, you don't want to go there. It's a rough trip. Suffice it to say that ten-year-olds can have philosophies. Usually they're better than the philosophies of adults, though I reckon that's only because adults are thinking of too many things when they draft a philosophy.

You look out a window in the middle of an afternoon, and what do you see? From the cafeteria in this building, I can see tarps billowing many stories below, at the base of a construction site. I cans ee people crossing the street. There is no pattern to their movements. There is no average path one person takes. Sometimes weird things happen, like cars stopping in the middle of the road to let a guy on a bicycle pass. I can see straight down the incline, between this Blue Mountain and that Red Hill, and people walk in multiple-file in a rough swarm down toward where they have to go. What we see when we look out the window is a world that doesn't know it is being seen. It acts accordingly. A created world doesn't have the sudden flash of reality. It doesn't have elements that all have their own histories and their own words. Rather, we build up one detail at a time, and when a guy makes a game where ice cubes melt after they're spilled on a table, to some people, it doesn't matter that the ice cubes are melting far more quickly than they have any reason to. Most people are intrigued that the ice cubes are melting at all.

Most of the time, I wasn't entertained. I was upset that the way I'd chosen to pass time, which involved delving into false worlds, did little more than turn my perfect, natural world inside out. I was now the exact opposite of what I didn't know I wanted to be.

I eventually became taken to lining up objects. I made forks parallel to plates. I tilted napkins into diamond shapes that pointed directly at the centers of the accompanying plates. I made sure my shoes were lined up perfectly. I did this, I guess, for a couple of years. I made sure the hand towels in the bathroom were all the proper length. I went through books and magazine articles with a red pen and crossed out the words I didn't like (usually negating particles). I turned a lot of commas into semicolons.

Then, one day, on VHS, in our basement, with my brother, I watched a movie that changed my life. The movie was called "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure." What an amazing thing, to have your life changed by a movie called "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure." This movie is about two high school underachievers who are visited by a man from the future, who tells them that, in the future, they are the rock and roll stars who unite the world with love and peace. However, in order for this to happen, they need to graduate from high school. They are given a time machine, and they visit various periods of history, and kidnap various historical figures to take back with them as their presentation.

Anyway, there's a scene late in the movie where Bill and Ted are in trouble. There's somewhere they need to get, and they can't get there because they don't have their keys. They're running out of time. So Bill (or Ted, I can't remember) gets this great idea — "After we [finish doing what we have to do], let's get my keys, and then come back here and place them somewhere . . . like, under this rock." He lifts the rock. There are the keys. "Now we just have to remember to come back and put these keys here afterward, or we'll be in serious trouble."

My logic-only twelve-year-old self really hated this scene. I knew immediately it was impossible. Because if they don't have the keys, they fail at what they're trying to do. If they fail — that's all well and good. They can still get the keys and travel back in time and put them in the appointed place. However, if they have the keys, then that means they won't fail, and the opportunity to get them and put them in that place won't arrive. Or will it? Of course it will — only, it will be a different opportunity. The keys they place beneath the rock will be different from the keys they removed from the rock. They will come from a different universe. Therefore, they will be false.

Whether the screenwriters had known it or not, they had created a Klein Bottle of a plot piece. It was a Mobius Strip on a movie screen, on VHS, in my basement. I considered it for far longer than I think anyone's supposed to consider something. It was the whimsical tone of the movie that made such a dark-question-evoking plot loop stand out in my young mind.

Eventually I reasoned there was a rhyme for every season. I knew that the wrong things I did were wrong. I knew my behaviors, like crouching with my hands clasped to my head when I heard a loud sound, made people think I was weird. I knew that this would doom me as long as I stood and sat in rooms full of other people. Just as much, I knew that many of the things I saw — like forks and plates — were inventions of man. They were manufactured conveniences. I didn't lament this. I accepted it. They were not archetypes. They occupied no place in the human collective pool of knowledge. They were not bright lights, they were not slithering snakes. They were tools of civilization. They did not need to be straightened; they were concept over execution; before they were made, they were as straight as they would ever need to be.

I reasoned very simply: I am in knots. There are many things about me that are tied to other tangles. I need to remove them one at a time. I had, by that point, devoted large fragments of time to things like memorizing the names of all the generals in Three Kingdoms and what they'd done to make them worthy of having their names put down and read nearly two thousand years later. I had memorized most everything in Norse mythology. What good were any of these things? I just kept them in my head somewhere I couldn't touch. Why fill a bank vault with newspaper clippings? I was a walking wet bundle of newsprint.

So one day, I got the idea, to let life go by. To let everything be. I wrote in a notebook:

I, hereby solemnly certainly swear to, from tomorrow forward, labor to build a time machine, which I will then take back in time to three-thirty-six in the afternoon of Thursday, October 8th, 1992.

The next day, I woke up, and I didn't feel like building a time machine anymore. Three days later, the time machine didn't come. I guess it was because I didn't have the fighting spirit. I sat on the edge of the woods and wondered — it was a nice evening — did the time machine not come because I'd not possessed the fighting spirit? Oh no, of course not. It didn't come because time machines are impossible. No — it didn't come because I'd never obtained the fighting spirit. Yes. It didn't come because the fighting spirit itself didn't exist. It didn't come because, to me, there is no battle worth fighting that can't be won in an instant. Fourteen years later, I would wonder, maybe it didn't come because, when I look back at that scene, everything behind the woods is a blue screen, like on a sound stage in a science-fiction movie shoot. I don't even remember where that was. Who knows, and how do they know?

I thought about the net of tangles within me. I thought how I could probably undo them all without thinking about them. All I had to know was this: The solution to each of your problems is unique. Solving them is not difficult at all. However, to do them all at once would be disasterous, and lonesome. All you need to do is know that they are simple to solve, and take it for granted. Let them all be solved later. For now, act as though they're already solved. I didn't do this right away. I rolled forward, asleep. One morning I woke up, with an erection.

I wanted to have sex very badly. I guess that happens to people. I was seventeen years old when it got the better of me.

I deployed my idea. I sent countermeasures out against the missiles that took flight every time I saw something I didn't like or didn't need. I became able to speak again. I made a friend in two weeks. His name was Big Joe. He was neither Big nor Joe, therefore Big Joe. He was Chinese, and he was in Indiana. Within six months, I'd had sex with a Russian girl three years older than me. She was beautiful.

I guess the idea is, there's a button somewhere that you can't press. All you have to do is promise yourself that you will press it if you ever get the chance, and that will make everything you ever do worthwhile, and worth doing. It will make everything you've ever done gorgeous.

I used to fear, though, that the countermeasures would run out of gas, and the missilies would come back. All of the tangles that I'd suddenly ignored would fall back in my lap, and I'd be in misery. I feared that more than anything. I fell in love with a woman; she was married. She died. I fell in love with a girl, and I couldn't help comparing her to the one that had come before her. I didn't know how these things happened. This was new to me. I couldn't help comparing her to everything that can be be compared to anything. I ended up betraying her trust, and after that, i was running from everything. One day, I made a friend who scared me, moved me, and changed me. She killed herself on a bright morning following a snowfall and a snowmelt, which is the same kind of morning everyone dies on, if you think about it correctly.

The intense fear I'd held concerning everything meant nothing in the context of what we see whenever we open our eyes. I could not and would not ever be afraid of anything ever again. I had carried out every social interaction shaking in fear that one day the moment would come when I was supposed to board that time machine, get my keys, and put them under that rock — I feared I would miss that moment, and I would rip my undying past from the pages of the universe. Yet I realized on a day, overlooking a trainyard in a town I'd later come to live in, watching the parallel lines of train tracks just sit there and reflect the sun, that no one would ever cash in on the opportunity to unmake me. When we see the street, we see bodies in motion.

I guess that's how you can change everything. It's not a religion and it's not a solution. It's just an idea. You just have to be calm about it. One night, walking home, I had a bowl of ramen at a shop run by a Chinese woman, in the dead of night, my face red with cold. I sat there and stared at it. An old lady stumbled in, crying. The Chinese woman took the old lady under her arm. The old lady moaned — her husband had gone to the whorehouse a mile away. She knew he was there because he went there yesterday. She'd been drinking. I thought, wow. Man. These things never end until we do. I ate the ramen and I just felt horrible about everything, in this little greasy place with stained wooden walls. Like I was in someone's living room and they didn't invite me there. By the end of the meal, the final slurp of noodle-soup, the final mouthful of rice arrived in my stomach like a cordial invitation to a banquet. I'd been invited here because I'd been invited everywhere, and anywhere. Let it be. Outside, the moon was shining.

If that's not perfectly gorgeous, I don't know what is.


	2. Chapter 2

The miracle was a train. It flew like a hawk. It loved everyone, and it died alone.

It never got lonely. It never got sad. It ran till it stopped, like a rolling stone.

The train is one line; one gray-striped rectangular prism, one bullet on wheels; it heads from where you want to be to where you have to be, and back. It runs all day and it runs all night. It loves everyone and they don't love it back.

I rode the train on a gray morning, and I didn't hear it moaning. I didn't hear it wail, and I didn't hear it complaining.

I rode it back, from the place I had to be to the place I wanted to be. Inside the train was a blinking of power. In every rider's hand was a wilting lily flower. Sooner or later I was pressed against a young man with a briefcase in his hand. Later than sooner, he and I were as familiar as two loving molecules in a bowl of soup.

I'd often wondered what odds it would take for a train to ride a full ten stops without anyone getting off. Even if such a thing happened, it'd be hard for me to determine it was really happening. Each car of a train, wherever it's coming from and wherever it's going, is its own little, rectangular world. Whether I sit or stand, I aspire to be like that train, to be a long sequence of ordered worlds. Whether I have a seat on the end of a bench (optimal) or a seat on the middle, if I am sitting, I am watching. Who's going to get off the train next? Who's going to stay on?

I don't talk to these people. Though I may occasionally stare them in the eye for thirty uninterrupted minutes — the neck has no other place to move sometimes — I dare say I've never met anyone on a train. It takes a few words, at least a sentence or two, to say you "met" someone. Yet we don't talk on the trains. It wouldn't be right. I'm not saying that sarcastically. I'm saying it gravely.

When I sit, I can see everyone in that rectangular world. When one leaves, I grow sad. It's after ten in the evening, and a woman who boarded the train in the fashion district of Ginza is getting off at the grim neighborhood of Ningyouchou. What's she doing there this time of night? Why's she leaving our team of fearless passengers? Does she, too, believe in the curse, that if you travel with people for too long, you start to share the same dreams? An old man who looks retired, on the other hand, gets off at Iriya, where people can physically do nothing other than live, and I feel a little jealous of him. I have every right to.

You wake up in the morning, and it's so cold you hardly remember that it makes you sad to see people you've never met becoming people you'll never meet. Morning comes, day flows like a river, and it hits night like a rock, and you're on your way back to the place you want to be, which you made with your own two hands, and you start seeing people invisibling themselves from you. It's like a piece of ice lodged in a lung. It makes you feel young. It makes your breath cold. It makes you feel old.

Some nights, there's frustration. The windows are fogged with men and women's breath. There are no children here. You're in a tunnel beneath the earth. You look at the windows and think, there are so many people in here, I can't even see outside! You don't think, "There's nothing outside those windows" because the windows are fogged. And if he windows weren't fogged, you'd feel irritated at the people blocking the view. And if the people weren't blocking the view, then you'd look out and feel disappointed. This all has to do with your mood. Terrible moments birth temporary disasters. You sleep, you learn.

You think, "Is no one ever going to get off this train?" What if no one did? How full would it grow? Once it reached the end, how much farther would it go?

I think of myself sometimes, confidently, as a person who does things differently. As an individual rather than a team player. The question of where the train would go if no one got off had bothered me for a while. Because I knew deep down that the answer wasn't as important as the fact that if no one else got off the train, I wouldn't get off, either. It was kind of the inverse of the question "if all your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you jump off, too?" See, jumping off the bridge requires action. It requires climbing up that bridge. It requires being with your friends.

Love is a train everyone rides; it's a train you ride until the day you die. You never get off this train. It stops just to show you it can; it stops just to show you that out there, there is temptation; out there, there are places to stand that don't roll; out there, a frigid wind blows. The train stops to open its doors and take a deep breath. A few more passengers file in. The train reaches its stop — the place you want to be — and you can't move a muscle. A group of people from the place you want to be force their way into the train. You're packed in so hard your back is twisted at a bad angle. This new influx of people changes the angle, and it's not so bad anymore.

Last night, the miracle occurred; no one got off that train — at least in my car — between Ginza and Minami-Senju. The train was packed. The man I'd been growing closer and closer to over the last eighteen minutes, the man who'd been like an adjacent molecule in a drop of water, had become first like an adjacent atom in a molecule, and eventually like a fellow orbiting electron, and finally, we were like protons in a nucleus. Though wearing a smart suit, he was young, maybe younger than me. He looked like a guy who admired those who admired those who made beautiful things. This, and he was having trouble with a girl. He whispered, as the train rocked,

"I get sick when royals betray their retainers

I cringe when the contents outweigh their containers

I hate brain teasers and despise no-brainers

Tell me, where can I find the slack to maintain her?"

I went on thinking, restlessly. The train moved, stopped to breathe, and moved again. It stopped at Minami-Senju. I took in a breath of the cold air.

"I'm getting off this train," I said. "Get out of the way." No one moved. It was like a nightmare involving a train. "Get out of the way." I swiveled around. I put my hands against a big man's back, and pushed. He toppled forward. People spilled out onto the platform. I was one of them. My knee dipped toward the pavement. I stood up and dusted myself down. The people got sucked back into the train. I was alone on the platform. I breathed. I saw it hang in front of me.

The train went on, like a rolling stone. Past the last stop, where no moonlight shone. It wobbled and rocked like an odd pebble thrown; fell of the edge of the earth, died full and alone.


	3. Chapter 3

See, Death's after Love, three feet off her heels; he's riding flat-out like all the saints and the ghost of Moses was three feet behind him . . . and he's hungry. Hungry, hot-chained and reckless, on a bike half Harley and half Hell Itself, tires hovering half an inch above the ground.

And you might think that would be enough, to catch a little thing like Love all there alone by her lonesome, but get this: she's on God's own moped, that girl, and she's pushing that holy chunk of tin on high-octane rainbows and unicorn farts, and it's always just fast enough to hold the distance there.

Barely.

And so it goes down on down the road, as fast and steady as you please, through the sun and the bugs and the dust and the rain, the ever-loving grind of single-minded obsession and single-minded indifference. And then... hell, when they finally meet when Love finally digs her spiked pink heels into the dust, and jackknifes that moped right there in the middle of the road, and there's that final conflagration of dust and grease and she looks Death full in the face and screams What. Do. You. Want...

Well.

That's something Death hasn't quite been prepared for.

I mean, he's looked at the situation from all possible angles at that point, and it's frankly kind of baffling, to a guy like him. He thought he'd readied himself for any eventuality - but now, actually face-to-face with her, there in the road... he finds himself very much the Dog That Caught The Car.

She flips back her visor. She's a pretty thing, 'course, better than Death could have imagined in his loneliest nights, and she's got a little heart tattooed on her right cheek, right below the eye. He coughs a mess of grime into his fist.

"Uh..."

"Yeah?"

Death wiggles his toes around in one of his boots.

"Was... well, was kind of wondrin' if you'd like to maybe... ah, hell Clarence, you are screwing this up... I was... well, wondrin' if you maybe could see clear to finding your way to a cup of coffee or somethin'. With me."

Love looks at him and blinks, just once - long lashes and a perfectly balanced sense of the very most cosmopolitan corners of the modern cosmetics industry. She makes herself a damn unfriendly face.

"God! No!"

And then she's off again - fast, blinding fast, and at the same time taking it just a bit easier, because she knows what a man is willing to do for Love, and she knows what a man like Death is willing to do for Love, and she knows that a man like Death would rather die on the very spot than mount his hell-cycle again and take up the same old hunt.

And Death... he stands there, in the sun and the heat and the dust and the bugs, and he kind of holds his hands there at his sides, and he kind of balls and unballs his fists for a good little while, and then there's a scream, a good manly kind of scream, and a couple of vultures fall from the sky.


	4. Chapter 4

I call this "the sinking ship situation".

Basically, you're in this ship, right? It's not a particularly attractive ship, but it has this sort of rusty charm that makes you like it despite its flaws. You feel really, truly at home on this ship and the way it rocks back and forth in the saltwater at night helps you go to sleep. One day, you decide to take this ship for a trip to the Arctic Circle even though your sailor buddies are warning you not to and you're not even sure why you're doing it yourself. You end up doing it anyway - maybe out of curiosity, maybe out of spite - and everyone sort of chuckles uneasily but they all bid you a safe journey into the wild unknown. You smile, light a cigarette and chug off in that rusty boat for the North.

So, let's say that you're chugging through the Arctic Sea and it's so cold your words are freezing and falling to the ground, clinking when they hit the deck. "But hey," you think to yourself, "This isn't so bad. I can swing this sort of life for a while."

Well, see, then you hit this big iceberg. I mean it's really huge, right? Cuts this big gash all along the side of the boat while you were posing on deck looking cool in your Captain Gordon raincoat and you hear "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" playing. Problem is, the big iceberg destroyed your radio equipment so you can't SOS any boats that may be nearby. So, we're left with a choice:

Do you hold on to the last second, abandon ship, jump into the icy waters of the Artic Sea, shoot some flares and hope to God that there's a boat nearby that sees you before you freeze to death? Or, do you accept the consequences of your rash and ill-advised journey and sink down into the depths with this rusty but lovable hulk of a ship that really never did you any wrong?

The waters are cold, but the inside of the ship is warm for now; at least it will be until it sinks under the waves. Oh, and if you stay aboard you'll drown which is quicker and probably more pleasant than dying of hypothermia, desperately trying to stay afloat until your strength wears out and you sink like a stone. Though, is that glimmering of hope - of possible rescue by another warm boat that might be rusty and lovable too - enough to deny fate for? Is that worth betraying the boat that stuck by you until the end - a victim of your decisions - for a few more fleeting moments of life? Do you think you'll regret not going down with the ship, like a good captain would? Or, should you rage against your misfortune and forge on, not giving up? Would you rather take the plunge instead of just lying down like an old dog? you think you see another ship on the horizon, and boy does it look shiny. Though, it could just be a chunk of ice way off in the distance, reflecting sunlight. You can't tell and your trusty boat is taking on water fast. You've got to make some sort of decision.

That water's really cold, but you're a pretty good swimmer, right?


	5. Chapter 5

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

Though twisty roads packed tight with choads

May stymie you, you can

Demure! Avoid their macabre gaze!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

Fortuna's foal find purchase whole

Upon Earth's azure span!

The blessed few then sure to view

God's Holy Caravan!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

Delight in Worry? Foolscap jury!

Non-Prescription Flan!

To wit: the Embers cattle-called

Entreaty the Sudan;

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

Malarkey's barking pale moon parking

Innocence D'urban!

The atmospherics fear to hear the

Cousins of Dianne!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

Debase yourself upon the shelf

You purchased in Spokane!

And nevermore's a whore's encore:

A frozen-jawed Cheyenne!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world's full of Beauty, Sir . . .

. . . and I am but a Man!


End file.
